The Surreal Photo Worlds of Erik Johansson, Built by Hand

We like surrealism at Moss and Fog. A lot. The genre offers instant escape, a short walk into dreamland without leaving your chair. But where much of today’s surreal imagery leans on obvious digital tricks, Erik Johansson goes the long way around. The Swedish photographer and retoucher, born in 1985 and now based in Prague, builds his impossible worlds almost entirely out of real photographs.

We first stumbled onto his image Full Moon Service years ago, a night scene in which uniformed workers hang a glowing moon from a stepladder while spare moons wait in the grass beside their van. It looks seamless because, in a sense, it is. Johansson combines hundreds of individual captures of real places, real props, and real people into a single frame, with barely any CGI in sight.

Photo Manipulation as a Craft

Each picture starts as a pencil sketch and can take months, sometimes years, to complete. Johansson scouts locations across Scandinavia and the Czech countryside, builds full-scale props, photographs every element under matching light, and then assembles the puzzle one layer at a time. His behind the scenes videos are nearly as fun as the finished images, revealing giant scissors, sewn bedsheets, and moons made by hand. The rule he holds himself to is simple: if something should feel photographed, it must actually be photographed.

In Endless Reflections, a still Nordic lake gives up its logic, and a rowboat hangs suspended from its own mirror image. The quiet morning light is what sells it. Nothing screams for attention, so your eye accepts the impossible before your brain catches up.

Scenes That Should Not Exist

Johansson’s catalog is full of gentle ruptures in reality. A sleeper’s bedsheets roll away into moonlit ski slopes in Snow Cover. A seamstress stitches winter onto an autumn field in Expecting Winter. A colossal stone sphere teeters above a village in Imminent, and in Cumulus and Thunder a farmer shears clouds straight off his sheep. Rain becomes a school of fish, dawn gets cut loose with scissors, and a row of old town houses arches between two cliffs like a bridge with nowhere to be.

Johansson keeps a busy exhibition schedule, with recent museum shows at Fotografiska and current dates listed on his site. His work is a standing reminder that photo manipulation, done with patience and real materials, is a craft as much as a trick. For more images that stop us mid-scroll, browse our breathtaking photography collection, look up surrealism in our visual culture glossary, or keep wandering the design hub.

Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog

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